Extremely Irate Building Manager Screaming For Elevator Repair

By consumerist.comOctober 4, 2006

Recording of a building manager who wants his crappy elevator fixed, “right this [expletive] minute.” Even if the repairman shows up in the next five minutes, he vows to “still punch his [expletive] face in.”

Kudos to the customer service rep for remaining completely cool and professional the whole time (a study in contrasts).

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That kind of temper tantrum thrown by an adult of sound mind is… astounding. Frankly, no one deserves to be verbally abused like that for things that are out of their control, regardless of how angry you might be.

Speaking as a fellow CSR, I can really appreciate this guy’s technique. When a rude customer is just looking for a fight, sometimes the only way to get at him is to ignore his obnoxious attitude. You can almost hear the angry building manager thinking, “Damn it, can’t you hear what an asshole I am? I’m a jerk! Why won’t you argue with me?” The elevator rep does a supreme job of providing customer service while simultaneously NOT giving the customer what he wants. Bravo!

I work in retail. I am there to help customers. However, when someone calls and goes off on me like that I hang up. Then I go on break. More and more retailers are asking their front-line employees to subject themselves to abuse in the name of good Customer Service but I can not and will not. Life’s too short.

To me, it sounds like this wasn’t his first call about this particular problem. If he’s in charge of the comfort and safety of the people in his building, his livelihood depends on that elevator working reliably. How many times does his vendor have to screw up, trapping tenants between floors, before this sort of belligerence is understandable, if not justified?

I’m new here, but I could have sworn this site was pro-consumer. This guy is a consumer. His elevator company is the service provider. We should be chastising the elevator company for releasing the audio tape in order to humiliate the customer they served so poorly it provoked this raging tirade.

Who among us hasn’t felt like this guy at one point or another? Put yourself in his shoes: He’s got tenants trapped in the elevator for the 10th freaking time. The service techs are incompetent. He’s going to get fired if he can’t get this thing fixed. And maybe he was having a bad day to start with. Can you blame him for being a little upset?

The CSR did a good job keeping his cool, yes. But whoever released this tape deserves a serious ass kicking. And I want to know if he ever got his damn elevator fixed.

Mike, regardless of if he’s called about it before. Making threats, and being ass is not acceptable. This kind of behavior on to a customer service rep SHOULD be broadcast for people to point and laugh at. It will hopefully teach people a lesson, and potentially save lives.

I worked at management level in the call center of a small ISP. By the time a customer was transferred to me, they were generally pretty irate. It happens. No one ever said they’d shove an elevator up my nose, but I certainly endured my fair share of abuse, including a substantial number of f-bombs.

I just listened to this call again. The rep did a fine job following his dispatch script, and he maintained his composure, but I don’t think he earned any medals. Perhaps customer service is not part of his job. If it were me, I would have done more to relate to the customer as a human, instead of sticking to the “information gatherer” routine. He didn’t even try to calm the guy down.

Whoever released this recording didn’t censor it very well. There’s enough information here to easily determine the customer’s business name, full name and phone number with a few simple Google searches. I found a digg entry with a comment suggesting people harass the guy.

I can agree this guy went a little overboard, but the real demon here is the elevator company. Their crappy service drove this poor guy over the edge, and then the big corporation deliberately humiliated him by releasing this recording.

Consumerist missed the juicy nugget and took the cheap shot. Maybe when we’re done heckling the angry consumer, someone can look into what made him so angry, and what the elevator company is going to do to make up for unnecessarily subjecting him to all this ridicule.

The customer was wrong. The elevator company was much, much, much wronger.

About a year ago, a guy in Connecticut was on the phone with a Comcast CSR. He told the CSR something along the lines of “If you don’t fix my fucking cable, I’m going to the Comcast office and will fucking kill you.” Or something like that — I’m paraphrasing. Of course Comcast had the guy’s name and address, so they called the cops and the guy got arrested. I have a short temper, but what a damn idiot.

1. CSRs are not counselors. They are not there to hold your hand; they are there to help you. They do not want to hear about your fishing trip, or what you like to do in your spare time. They want to help you in the manner that befits their job. Many of them are forced to listen to abusive crap simply because if they don’t the customer will complain about them to someone else, citing “bad customer service.”
2. This man is obviously fed up, but screaming and cussing to get what he wants, and then deliberately being snarky/feeding false information to a rep is not how you get things accomplished. Sure, write the BBB. Speak to a supervisor. Get someone who can cooperate with you on your level. These are all things that can be done to improve your predicament. Dial 911, for the love of pete. I expect a 5 year old to scream and shout and cuss or perhaps a kid on Xbox live to do that. Not the owner of a business. Please. We are human beings, not chimpanzees.
3. The company that released this is of course, out of line. Aside from the privacy factor, this really shouldn’t have made it to the internet with so much information intact. Wow. Although I would probably blame whoever had access to the tape, as they most likely snuck it out without the company’s consent….

Mike – there was no one trapped on the elevator. The jackass on the phone was being . Of course he was told that he should dial 911 if there was someone trapped on the elevator. He didn’t do that, did he?

By the way, he is from Utica, NY. Before you even joke about “stereotypes” at least make sure he is from the place you are joking about. Ever been to Utica? Lots of nothing.

Under no circumstances should anyone, ever, treat another person the way this man treated the CSR. First of all, the CSR did not build the elevator, second he does not repair the elevator. The CSR’s job is to take the call, assign a repair technician and move on.

Threatening physical violence is completely moronic. I would not send one of my employees to a customers site if that customer had just made threats of violence.

I’ve bought plenty of things that suck. Swearing and threatening the company will usually get me nowhere.

Part of being pro-consumer is showing the potential jackasses why they should not make the leap to qualified jackass as it will degrade your ability to obtain the best service possible.

This is my concern: I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard a pre-connect announcement that says, “Your call may be monitored or recorded for quality, training, and retaliation purposes.” No matter how outrageous the call, there is absolutely no excuse for a call center releasing a recording like this. Ever. Not even this one.

Obviously, this elevator company isn’t the most scrupulous business in the world. If they’re releasing recordings like this, what other sort of abuse are they subjecting their customers to? Look past the outburst. I want to know what set this guy off in the first place.

First of all the angry guy doesn’t even know where he is…”this is New York City, New York.” Utica is nowhere near NYC. Second, I think that “abusive” language being the dialect of the area is a bit of a stereotype. I live in the city and have never come across people this irate, you could practically see the steam coming out of his ears. But maybe I would be too if I had Martians stuck in my elevator. You gotta get those guys out of there, their trouble.

So was the caller saying that someone (Martian or otherwise) was stuck in the elevator in hopes of expediting the service call?

Another semi-related story:
A few years ago, a guy in my city discovered his Chevy Yukon SUV (is it a Chevy? anyway…) had been stolen. He didn’t think the police were going to give his case the attention he felt it deserved, so he called 911 and told them that his baby niece had been stapped in a car seat in the Yukon when it was stolen. So the whole city is in a tizzy — Amber Alert, tons of media reports, everything. Until niece’s mom says WTF — my baby’s napping in the next room. All this because the guy REALLY wanted his Yukon back, and fast. Now he’s really in trouble.

If this guy is lying to the elevator company about someone being trapped, it’s not the same as calling 911 with a false report, but it would still be pretty snarky. I think we’ve established that this guy is pretty snarky, though.